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Speaking to PCGamesN, the publisher confirmed that they have been in discussions with Valve about Assassin’s Creed Unity, “but for the time being the game is not available via Steam in the UK. In the meantime, UK customers wishing to purchase the game digitally can do so by visiting the Uplay store, our retail partners or other digital distributors.” The Crew and Far Cry 4, meanwhile, are listed on Steam throughout the world but not in the UK, suggesting they might befall the same fate.

This isn’t merely an issue of not being able to enjoy the convenience of Steam, or even about avoiding Uplay, since all Ubisoft games require the service regardless of where you buy them. Instead, the greater issue is that Uplay prices tend to be higher than on Valve’s service. To buy Assassin’s Creed Unity via Uplay will cost you £50 for example, or £40 as an incentive to pre-order.

Ubisoft haven’t said why Assassin’s Creed Unity or those other games won’t be available through Steam, or why that decision is UK-specific. It’s not the first time something like this has happened, though. When Bethesda and Splash Damage game released Brink back in 2011, it quickly vanished from the Steam store in the UK. It was rumoured at the time that this was because of UK-specific deals made with brick-and-mortar retailers.

Game developers and publishers are obviously free to release their games wherever and however they like, but even as someone who has never experienced serious technical problems with Uplay, this seems a shame.

Correction: This post originally stated that Assassin’s Creed Unity cost £50 to pre-order. The pre-order price is £40, while the full price is £50.

96 Comments

That’s a pity; The Crew looked rather fun. I’ll have a look around for free copies later; there’s usually a load of them from the graphics card manufacturers – that’s how I got Farcry 3 and Black Flag, anyway.

Wishing misfortune upon the retails stores and unemployment upon those who work in them seems a bit harsh. Is it not the games publishers themselves who are still ultimately responsible for perpetuating these ridiculous release strategies?

It goes both ways, those stunts are played by the big companies, like Gamestop and others.

I am sad about the demise of brick & mortar stores, but the REAL ones, those independent little realities that were far too often shrugged by the majority of people, stores that had some serious vintage stuff and rare jewels in there. In fact, this applies to more or less any reality, like supermarkets against specialized stores. Ultimately people chose convenience and some often obscure “added value” and they killed them.

I realize that when something closes down people lose jobs, but then again those with a job at Gamestop could have had the same job in another shop that got killed exactly by the former. It’s a big can of worms and, while i can agree that my sentiment was a bit rough and not well presented, the big picture is something complex.

See, even this last paragraph is a bit broken, this might be an interesting discussion with some proper thought put into it, but for now i just hope you more or less got my point.

I’ve worked with people from small small independent shops , and more than the big chains, it’s the shit pulled buy big publishers that has been hurting them – at least in my experience.

Having witnessed first hand the strong-arming of Nintendo salesmen forcing small shops to buy products they know they wouldn’t sell if they wanted to keep access to stocks of the big sellers, not to mention the price fixing, having seen them offer all those deals to the big chains while complaining on their influences at the same time, I must I have little sympathy left for the publishers.

As for wishing misfortunes on others, as always: may we all have the life we deserve I guess.

“To pre-order Assassin’s Creed Unity via Uplay will cost you £50, for example. ”
No, it won’t. If you go on the actual store page for it, it’s £40 Download £50 retail. The download offer comes with £10 off (hence £40, bringing it in line with other digital retailers) and a free copy of ACIV: Freedom Cry.

I browsed around and only *one* retailer I could find in the UK has the download version at £50 – and that’s GamersGate. It did have a PayPal offer at one point (pre-order w/ PayPal and get a discount), but it’s currently sat at £50. Everywhere else is selling it for ~£40 – including UPlay.

You also have to bear in mind that the pricing of the PC versions of Ubi’s latest titles follow the same pattern we saw throughout the last generation where the PC version is ~£10 cheaper than the console versions… and considering the console versions are XB1 and PS4, which carry a higher price than 360/PS3, there’s nothing particularly untoward going on here.

Don’t forget that The Witcher 3 is just the same, with a list price of about £50 on PC, 10% off normally (£45), going to 22% and then 27% if you own previous titles. So the cheapest you can get it, technically, is about £37. Is this also a bad thing, or is it just a potshot at Ubisoft because they’re an easy target?

My mistake. It’s £40 to pre-order, and £50 normally. I’ve corrected the post and thank you for pointing it out.

But the price is still rubbish. The cost only approaches a reasonable price if you buy it before it’s out, and before anyone is in a position to tell you whether it’s any good or not.

Will they pop it all the way up to £50 on release, or keep it at supposedly discounted prices? I don’t know, but Watch_Dogs was certainly always more expensive through Uplay than anywhere else.

Yeah, Ubisoft aren’t the only company to do this. Origin is crap for it as well, and I’ve criticised it and EA in reviews of their games. £10 cheaper than new-generation console prices or not, the prices still stink.

They still are. I can pre-order Far Cry 4 right now for £25 and I can barely remember the last game I paid more than £30 for.

If you’re paying more than £30 on a regular basis, you need to look into sites like savygamer, hotukdeals, isthereanydeal etc and get into the habit of looking at the digital distribution outlets and digital stores before buying anything – the likes of greenmangaming, gamersgate, getgames, gamefly, simply-cdkeys, GOG, humble store, nuuvem, amazon etc.

The price is “rubbish” relative to other titles on the platform, many of which are ‘last’ generation level (i.e. have PS3/360 ports or of that performance level). The PC has always been the cheapest, and continues to be so. I find £40-50 for a new, next-gen-tech PC game less cheeky than Nintendo asking £40 for a four/five year old 3DS game.

Nintendo price for profit and not turnover. It has worked for them when the console it’s self has not flopped. They rake it in, where as Sony and MS tend to operate on just getting by with the skin of their teeth (though that might be creative accounting ;) ).

I can stomach the Origin exclusity ( read: i still can’t ) a bit better because Origin is not as crap and some games seem to have a very decent integration with all the interconnected extra systems in place.

I managed to make space for Origin in my system, but uPlay is best left as only the integrated Steam client and nothing more, and even that stinks.

the nice thing about Origin exclusivity is that the game knows it’s plugged into Origin. Even the console versions of EA games insist of plugging into Origin alongside the device’s own network. Where they maintain their own equivalent of “Friends” lists. All that AutoLog stuff in Criterion games would be great if it actually knew about the people I play other games with.

““To pre-order Assassin’s Creed Unity via Uplay will cost you £50, for example. ”
No, it won’t. If you go on the actual store page for it, it’s £40 Download £50 retail. The download offer comes with £10 off (hence £40, bringing it in line with other digital retailers) and a free copy of ACIV: Freedom Cry.”

The price change is a recent thing. I checked Ubi Store and it was £50 there when it was on steam initially. This is why GreenManGaming is charging £50 as well because Ubisoft set the price at £50 originally. I guess there was a backlash from the ridiculous pricing and they had to bring the price down to sell any copies on their store.

It will go back up to £50 when the game is released.

They will lose more and more business as people find other stores that sell the games cheaper. Like myself I got AC Unity, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age 3 for less than £25 each.

I refuse to pay their ridiculous prices. I don’t agree with The Witcher 3 pricing but the developers are respectable and very supportive of the PC platform and don’t charge for DLC so I will support them directly via gog.com unlike most AAA developers.

Yet another reason not to buy Ubisoft games then, though my tipping point was reached a while ago.

I get that the bug publishers don’t like Steam because of the cut Valve takes and the lack of control they get but everybody would be better served (including themselves) if they got together to provide an open and inclusive competitor instead of the single publisher ghettos they have now.

Yes, technically, it’s true that Origin and Uplay sell games from “other publishers”, however, in both cases, those games are almost exclusively a very narrow selection of indie games and/or older games (most of which they own the IPs of). I couldn’t find any AAA games which weren’t either published by, or the IP owned by EA or Ubi in their respective shops on a quick sweep.

So you’re really being pretty disingenuous there.

Personally this simplifies things for me – I’m just not going to buy Far Cry 4 if it isn’t on Steam. I’m not interested in the other games anyway, but FC3 was great, so FC4 was on my list for this year. No boycott – other Ubi games that appear on Steam, sure, I’ll get ’em, but if they don’t, well, stuff it.

But a quick look on Origin’s Action section? Found the most recent Assassin’s Creed games, Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs, Sniper Elite v2 and Remember Me. Bunch of semi-recent (last 2 or so years) AAA/major publisher titles there.
UPlay? Right at this minute they have a SEGA sale going on, including Company of Heroes 2, and the front page of the store advertises The Evil Within (Bethesda), Alien: Isolation (SEGA) and Final Fantasy XIII (Square Enix), not to mention other major titles (Shadows of Mordor included).

They really need to just let consumers make their own choices about where to buy games. I’m all for them trying to compete with Valve – monopolies aren’t generally good for anyone but the monopolist – but not by holding their games hostage to their competing service.

Can we get RPS to dig a little deeper on this?
As best I can remember, the following games all had the same thing happen:
Brink (Bethesda)
Skyrim (Bethesda)
Space Marine (THQ)
Saints Row 3 (THQ)
Far Cry 3 (Ubi)
Assassins Creed 3 (Ubi)

The common factor being titles that are available on both PC and console, and scheduled to be released at the same time on both console and PC (not the generic Ubi games are late again).

Perhaps a timeline of all games that have been affected, compared to that period when GAME were teetering on the edge of bankrupcy and this practice stopped entirely would make an interesting and non legally actionable article.

Are you quite certain? I purchased Skyrim from a brick and mortar place, on its release date, and activated it on Steam, which was a basic requirement for that game. Far Cry 3 was available on Steam too from the outset. Also got Space Marine on Steam no problem, though admittedly quite a long time after release, so I wouldn’t know for sure.

I’m in the UK and bought Skyrim on release from Steam. I am looking at the receipt in my email right now. So, did it disappear after release or something? Only appear really late before release? Or are you not talking about it’s release in the UK.

I’m talking about the UK – Skyrim was available to preorder for a really short window (like these Ubisoft games were in fact) then disappeared *in the UK only* until after release.
If you bought it on Steam, you either got a preorder in before it vanished, or bought a Steam key from a retailer that isn’t Steam (D2D, Gamersgate, GMG, etc).
It is literally only Steam as a storefront being explicitly blocked in these shenanigans, and only in the UK, and I really wish it would stop.

Fair enough. I pre-ordered it from Steam directly on the 7th of November, I see, not a third party. When did pre-orders for it on Steam start/stop, do you know?

These shenanigans are pretty awful. I assume British customers still have some kind of horrifying brick-and-mortar fixation which still makes this idiocy worthwhile to Ubi, sales-wise. I can’t see any other explanation, really.

It really makes none – in olden days you got a special ‘mini’ uPlay with every Steam game which required it but now it just fires-up “full” uPlay when you launch from Steam.

So there’s zero point in having it in Steam – basically – if you want to launch it from Steam anyway, you can do that of course – but you’ll be buying a uPlay key (likely from somewhere “greyish” selling them for half-the-price)!!

It certainly doesn’t unless you boot up Uplay, which there is literally no reason to do unless playing, unlike Steam. So yeah, that’s a small inconvenience. Personally I just think that if they want to cater to brick and mortar stores, then I can feel okay not buying games they do that with. It’s likely they’ll eventually appear on Steam, and cheaper to boot, so… win/win?

For people so into the game/series that they NEEEEEEEEED it on day 1 (rather than “would be willing to buy it/pre-order it day 1”), I don’t think it makes any difference what platform it’s on – they’ll do what it takes.

Purely that when bought through Steam, it’s sat next to thousands of games being advertised at the usual PC new AAA price of £35 or less. With no Steam presence, both EA and Ubisoft think they can get away with charging the same as a cosnole’s disc copy in GAME.

Well if it was on Steam and you’re willing to wait, you’d have the eventual Steam sale marking it down substantially in price. If you want to buy them immediately on release, then yeah, there wouldn’t have been a difference.

Here’s an example – I bought Splinter Cell Blacklist on Steam, liked it and decided to buy my brother a copy when I seen it on sale so we could play co-op. The sale copy was a U-Play key. When we decided to play a game it refused to connect so we tried quite a few things like checking online to see if ports needed opened etc. Eventually we figured that we had mismatched versions of the game (the game never notified us of this when attempting to connect)

While the Steam version was up to date, the U-Play version was the 1.0.0.0 version – it took 4 different patches (not one recent unified patch) to get him up to the most recent version and this wasn’t handled via U-Play but by us finding the patches ourselves and installing them.

For a game released on it’s own publishers platform, we found this backward to say the least.

Oh well, looks like I won’t be getting them then. They already have a questionable reputation with the PC crowd and if they want to be so petty as to not give me the choice of where to buy their product then I won’t buy it, it’s their loss.

You have plenty of choice of where to buy it – GreenManGaming, GamersGate, Game, probably GetGamesGo, Amazon, etc. Irrespective of where you buy it you need to use Uplay, which is no different at all from how you have to use Steam for the majority of major PC releases.

(I actually want many of the things Ubi publishes, but my desire to give them money is trumped by my distaste for jumping through hoops, and my appalling experience with the one Ubi PC game purchase I’ve made — From Dust.)

This. Steam is where I get my games. I’m willing to make exceptions in some cases (Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, indie games), but every time you make me go to another service, I am less inclined to buy your game.

Add shitty uplay style bollocks and it crosses the line from inconvenient to “not going to bother”

I do want their shit. Or rather, I want their shit as much as I want Steam’s shit, which is to say, I don’t want it at all but grudgingly accept it. I buy games DRM if possible and don’t particularly care which DRM with useless community features sprinkled on top I am forced to use.

Maybe Steam has corrupted me, but since I picked up a PS3 for SingStar i found that I’ll only begrudgingly take a disc copy if I can’t have it as a PSN download for a reasonable price. Switching discs is a pain and they take up space.

What competition? Bricks and morter retailers offer a drastically reduced product range, make it significantly harder to make purchases and often sell for higher prices. The only way for them to even resemble competition is by forcing other players out of the game in a way that penalizes consumers by taking away choice.

I still get several a year. It’s cheaper when buying in the launch week, and I just get the code and download it, rather than installing from disc. (See Amazon for Unity Download v Physical copy cost).

Ooh, ooh! People who like having game boxes on their shelf? Or people who like picking up games from places like Amazon because they are often cheaper and sometimes you get nice physical goodies? People who sometimes have an idle browse when they are bumbling around in town and think ‘stuff it, I might as well’?

Me, basically, and plenty of other people I know too. Also, there is the added advantage that installing a 50 GB game from a disc is much, much faster than downloading it!

To be fair, i think there’s some extra stuff involved, like some new or upcoming UK laws adding extra potential complications to their financial compromises with Valve.

Big publishers like Ubisoft, i feel, are already feeling the weight of all their agreements with Valve and this might be the last push needed for them to make the switch. If this goes down well for them we can easily expect them going the Origin route, which wouldn’t be a happy ending indeed.

Even UPlay games do auto-update when purchased through Steam. The system itself doesn’t do that, however, it waits until you want to run that game before announcing what patches it wants, then getting them from what appears to be a 56k modem on Ubi’s end.

Written down that looks logical. But running two launchers costs nothing in terms of time or performance, and is actually easier in terms of habit. Far Cry 3 is in the steam library where I keep my games…

Adding things as a non-Steam game is completely different from owning them on Steam. You get so little of the functionality that Steam brings to the table that it’s virtually pointless. You’d be better off just sticking a shortcut on your taskbar or the like.

There’s nothing principled about it for me, it’s just habitual behavioural. The steam library and to a lesser extent my gog account is where my games are kept these days. So, steam and gog are the store fronts I habitually see.

I already buy fewer EA games, am less aware of them generally (Sims 4 being a case in point), and Ubisoft will go the same direction if they keep this up.

Wierd but at worst its a minor inconvenience and at best you won’t care because you already have uplay installed.
The only people this will matter too are the wierdos that won’t buy a game unless its on steam.

I personally don’t like the added hassle. For me a game has to be really worth my time (i.e. strongly interested in, like mass effect 3) to buy on a non-steam or GOG store. And if a game is available from GOG and steam, I’ll pick the steam version if price is the same. Opening my steam launcher is opening my game library, for me its just not worth it to log into origin, try to remember my password, have it update for ten minutes, flash some ad in my face, patch the game i want to play (because there is always a patch) and then play it. Life is too short and there are too many games on PC.

If ubisoft is going to go the same way, I’ll do the same with them. It’ll mean that instead of buying Far Cry 4 and Ass Creed unity at or near launch prices, I might grab them for a fiver in a year, the same way I did Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3.

“Instead, the greater issue is that Uplay prices tend to be higher than on Valve’s service.”

That is not an issue. Developers and publishers set their prices on Steam, not Valve. If Ubisoft wants to undercut their UPlay prices on Steam, they can do so. Valve does not have any say in this. It is totally up to Ubisoft’s discretion. Even aside from that, Green Man Gaming often sells below MSRP by way of their constant vouchers. So, even if you can’t get a good deal from Steam versus UPlay, you will still likely be able to get a good deal from Green Man Gaming versus UPlay.

If anything, I think has 100% to do with the strongarming that UK brick-and-mortar game stores are doing to publishers, as has been seen before with other titles, such as BRINK and Space Marine.

I’m a pretty lazy gamer and I like to go where I know. Where I know is Steam, because having tried all of the other platforms it is my choice for features, convenience and price. Of course it’s up to Ubisoft if they want to make it more difficult for me to purchase their games than other publishers, but I’m happy to be lazy and just buy what’s convenient instead. It’s not the end of the world or anything, but if publishers dick me around like this I’m just not going to bother buying their games, life is too short to jump through hoops to give someone my money.

I came this close (tiny gesture) to boycotting FC3 because of having to have UPlay installed. If I have to actually boot that pile of shit up manually rather than letting Steam do all the heavy lifting for me I honestly don’t think I can be bothered. It sounds lazy, but it’s really more of a respect thing — namely the clear lack of respect Ubisoft have for me.

Any word on whether it’ll be region-locked on Steam?

I guess my only alternative is to return to my pirating ways of many a year ago and get me a completely drm-free copy. Whilst I’m at it I may as well seed the entire Ubi back-catalogue.

Interesting… The Crew, Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity have been pulled from steam in general now not just the UK market. I am going to speculate wildly that is a power play by Valve, because controversy or some such.

Personally I’m not too bothered about the often laughable new game prices on Origin, Uplay or even often on Steam too, since there are always better deals available. Having said all that it’s still a dumb move and will only hurt sales.

Ubisoft’s hissy fit has now gone global and they seem to have removed these three games from sale on Steam across all regions.

Oh well, makes my Christmas shopping a lot easier now that I don’t have to consider any of their titles. I was interested in all three of those titles but now I guess I won’t be buying any of them. Yes, I could buy them elsewhere but I’d rather not. Steam’s too convenient for me, so if Ubisoft are no longer interested in supporting Steam then I’m no longer interested in reporting Ubisoft.

I’ve since removed all Ubisoft products from my Steam wish list. Bit of a shame because I would have grabbed Child of Light, Valiant Hearts and maybe even Watch Dogs, during the Winter Sale, as well as gifting AC2 to a friend who’s keen to try the series out, but now none of that will be happening until such a time that Ubisoft see sense and reinstate new releases on Steam.

I’m ok with that. I buy Ubisoft games only in retail anyway (they’re twice as cheap in Poland as on Steam).Plus the “if it’s not on Steam I’m not buying it” is such an unhealthy attitude and movements like those should sway at least some of those people. If they loved closed gardens so much they can go and buy a console.